


punching in a dream

by dysprositos



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, Identity Issues, Magical Artifacts, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-28
Updated: 2020-05-28
Packaged: 2021-03-03 04:34:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,385
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24418963
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dysprositos/pseuds/dysprositos
Summary: First chapter is worldbuilding notes. Second chapter is the tragedy of Sasha James.The one where isn't the Archivist a magical girl?
Comments: 1
Kudos: 10





	1. this is worse than it seems

There are these magical artifacts called Nightmares that find their way into the hands of people who are overwhelmed by their power who are transformed and go on to wreak havoc and evil in ways you might find familiar. (Jon once saw a book with a Leitner bookplate turn a young man into a giant spider.) The people so ridden are technically called Nightmarers but the artifacts are usually well-hidden (destroying or more often capturing and physically removing them from the Nightmarers is enough to reduce their power and hold) so the public can be forgiven for the imprecision of calling the people Nightmares as well. For centuries, some people in the know have worked to find and neutralize Nightmares before they can destroy too many people's lives, although it's only in recent decades that their work has become impossible to hide from the public. The Magnus Institute is devoted to finding these, and even less-obviously-malign, magical artifacts, in order to sequester them safely away from the public and study them, with the aim of finding out where they come from, how best to neutralize them, to what extent their powers and effects are affected by the people they possess, etc.

Much rarer are the artifacts known as Dreams, which enable their wielders to transform at will (with an appropriate transformation and de-transformation phrase, of course) into empowered Dreamers who can, in some manner, fight the Nightmares in a way specific to their power. (It's not (usually) the flashy punches-and-laser-beams fights of your typical magical girl anime but that hasn't stopped the public from conceptualizing it that way.)

There are only three Dreamers in England right now: the flashy and popular Ringmistress, Nikola Orsinov, whose artifact (not publicly known and it's impolite to ask) enables her to help ex-Nightmarers suffering from particularly physical lingering transformations cope with and to some extent influence them; the mysterious and anonymous Webwalker, who tips off Section 38 about imminent Nightmare deaths; and the Institute's own Archivist, who can pull the trauma out of someone still in the grips of a Nightmare or Nightmare attack. (This drastically decreases the sufferer's chance of re-Nightmaring when encountering a magical artifact, and indeed seems to decrease the power of the original artifact as well, which aids in containment and study.)

Well, these are the ones Jon Sims knows about at the beginning of the story, of course, as he's entrusted with the Archivist's tape recorder and its activation phrases, given a team of assistants who will Definitely In No Way get caught up with artifacts of their own, and set to walk in the footsteps of Gertrude Robinson, who was actually much older than her transformed teenage state would suggest. How could he know about the man living in the tunnels below the Institute, whose bookplates have enabled so many Nightmare hunters to contain artifacts and even easily destroy them through burning, at the expense of his own infamy? How could he know how blurry the line between Dreamer and Nightmarer really was, until he saw it for himself? And how could he have ever thought to ask _what Elias Bouchard was doing with all those tapes?_

The artifact that Martin Definitely In No Way gets caught up with is a lighter with a web design on it. so far it seems to mostly light what you want to light on fire while also protecting other things from lighting on fire, which has come in handy on multiple occasions like dealing with worms, distracting the boss, petting c4,

(The activation phrase feature is mostly to lull the Archivist into a false sense of security; most Dreams do _not_ have one.)

The main distinction between Dreamer and Nightmarer is "are you overwhelmed by your power and doing havoc and evil? or are you in control of it and doing havoc _on_ evil?" but this is also pretty *rocks hand side-to-side*

For instance, Leitner-bookplated books are contained to the point that they can be used by anybody in small doses to do cool things.

It's just that the primary public exposure to people empowered by magical artifact is people who have become caught up in their terror or rage, _particularly_ ones who've been transformed into something physically inhuman, and then kind of... rampage as a result.

Jonah Magnus has been working very hard to suppress knowledge of how to make artifacts (some people inherit the knowledge, some people Live Forever, it's fine, it's just there's a difference between "there are 14 people in all of Europe who know how to make artifacts" and "the secret is on Wikipedia") pretty much ever since he successfully made his own eyeballs into artifacts which enable the wielder to be Jonah Magnus now.

The Archivist's tape recorder is also his creation. It's so much more subtle (and thematic) than Nikola Orsinov's trauma-collecting artifact. Imagine having to directly preside over rituals you instigate, instead of just having your Archivist pass over the cassette tapes that neatly store an equivalent amount of trauma harvested efficiently from a single person you didn't even have to traumatize.

Gabriel Sculptor-in-Clay's method of making artifacts tends to produce ones that draw in potential wielders as they seek to understand the contradiction. He very politely invited the Archivist to come see it and take notes. If Gertrude had gone herself, already bound as she was to a jealous ~~Nightmare~~ Dream, the artifact of the Door With All the Sides would have not found its first ~~victim~~ wielder that day. (All due credit to Michael Shelley, though, for thinking to turn the key before the knob, once he found another side, which is nearly as hard to do from the inside as it is from the outside. It was just his mistake to assume that was the _only_ other side....)


	2. I don't ever wanna be here

When Sasha James is first assigned to work in Artifact Storage, she's a little miffed. More than a little, in fact. She'd spent a good amount of time building up her reputation and resume on the academia side of things, and she was excited to come to the Institute and get a little more hands-on experience with Nightmares and proto-Nightmares, especially ones that had never been handled before, but here she is, set to checking on, dusting off, and otherwise maintaining only those artifacts the researchers at the Magnus Institute thoroughly understand. It's like she has to prove herself all over again, while men like Martin Blackwood can only fail--well, not up, but laterally, bouncing from department to department as his Master's degree fails to translate to practical understanding. But she holds her tongue, bides her time, pays _attention_ , and what she sees reassures her. Gertrude Robinson started off in Artifact Storage. Elias Bouchard started off in the _mailroom_. And the people who go directly to a position they're qualified for on paper seem to have a much harder time earning the respect and trust of their co-workers, and in this workplace, trust is everything. This is the first step on a career ladder that goes much higher than the alternatives.

As she becomes comfortable in Artifact Storage, and then gradually mentored in the ways of Artifact Processing, Sasha comes to earn that trust and respect, and only partly through her finely-honed research skills (cyber- and otherwise). What she actually has, what her co-workers prize, is her ability to approach any given artifact with no particular expectations or desires and no strong emotions, enabling her to see features and flaws that others couldn't (and without even _starting_ to form a Nightmare bond). It's just a matter of picking the right mask to wear, no different from, when she began working here, showing her co-workers her enthusiasm for her new job instead of her frustration at the apparent dismissal.

It's that skill, the one that has earned rare words of praise from Gertrude Robinson herself, which enables Sasha to notice that the drawer on the table recovered from Graham Folger's apartment, the table with the weird spiral-web pattern on it, the drawer that everyone knows is locked (even people who just started at Artifact Processing), has no actual record of being _tried_. The drawer, it turns out, is not locked. Inside is a pair of gloves, bearing the same web-spiral pattern, and a small card proclaiming them The Gloves of All Hands. She shuts the drawer and reports it, waiting to be assigned the gloves to process so she can learn their secrets in due course and with all appropriate caution. She's not a _fool_ , and that's why the Archivist who refuses to even have an archival assistant on staff any more--instead relying on her non-employee goth grandson who appears extremely artifact-savvy and not Nightmare-ridden from it--has all but proclaimed her the next Archivist.

But she isn't assigned to process the gloves. And she isn't assigned to be the next Archivist when Gertrude... dies? Disappears? The rumour mill is unclear. Instead, that honour goes to one Jon Sims, and, look, it's not like she doesn't appreciate the guy in his own way and with his own skills. In fact, she was considering tapping him when she became either head of an Artifact Acquisition team or Archivist. Tim has his skills--boy does he ever--but they're the kind of flashy that make him an ideal distraction, not the infiltrator who is dismissed and underestimated and sneaks around and gets the goods when no one's looking. Jonathon Sims is no one's idea of _sneaky_ , but something in his scrawny, grey-haired, academician frame and supercilious attitude makes people overlook him in a way that Sasha couldn't hope to accomplish herself. So her three-person team would be distraction, infiltrator, and trainee, whom you traditionally do not appoint yourself--except now _she's_ appointed to _his_ team.

And here's the thing. Sasha James is the kind of pretty where she gets _dismissed_ , but not the kind where she gets _ignored_. She gets benevolently shooed out of places she's not supposed to be, not allowed to stand there scowling and muttering and even poking at things but tolerantly ignored as being all bluster and hot air and no harm done or doable. So if she's going to be this team's infiltrator--and, you know, _does_ she? She's not sure Jon Sims knows _anything_ about team structure, or management, or artifact acquisition at all in fact--she's pretty much got to do it from behind a keyboard. Which works fine, but is frustrating, especially when Martin Blackwood starts taking on the kind of in-person tasks that would belong to _her_ role if she could _do_ it.

One way to feel competent again is to revisit her old stalking grounds and savour her old accomplishments. Which is how she discovers that everyone once again says the drawer is locked--she has an intern try it for her, just to make sure she's not being targeted by the table particularly, and, no, it's simply not locked at all--and no further research has been done on the gloves.

She tries them on. They appear to melt into her hands, leaving her with... her own hands. She has a minute of fear-then-masking-the-fear before she tries to take them off. They come off no problem, turning back into their previous design and sitting innocuously enough in the drawer when she puts them back.

Gloves that don't look like they're on you could have some advantages. But as she experiments with them, she discovers that they do in fact leave her own fingerprints and so honestly, what's the point? The point, she discovers, is when she's interrupted mid-experimentation at her desk, Tim asking her to log in real quick as Jon to officially finalise some paperwork. Jon has changed his password since the last time she took it off the sticky note under his keyboard, and his office is locked. The gloves go warm, and shift...

Having Jon's hands on her own arms is, uh, _weird_ , but there are no lingering effects, not even the muscle memory, and no nefarious effects while they're on, either. She's not magically compelled to write his e-mails for him or anything like that. (She does that for fun. Nothing new. And not while the gloves are on.) When she uses the Gloves of All Hands to have the hands of their targets, she's not affected by their Nightmare and her hands don't try to kill anyone. Everything is under control, is the point, and she doesn't get complacent; she makes sure to put them on only when she intends to use them, and to take them off after, and keep them in Artifact Storage most of the rest of the time, and the gloves--unlike some artifacts she could name--seem to have no objection to this.

And one day she's running from Jane Prentiss and she could _really use_ the fingerprints or retinas of Elias Bouchard to enable the new security measure with the carbon dioxide, and she's in Artifact Storage and traces the familiar steps to the table across from the mirror, the table she doesn't even bother to examine the spiral-web pattern on anymore, and she opens the "locked" drawer and instead of the gloves there's a smooth mask and a card reading The Mask of No Faces. (This isn't, actually, the first time she's seen it, but she _trusts_ the gloves and so on days the mask is all that will appear she simply eventually stops opening the drawer.) And, you know, the right retinas are as good as the right fingerprint to the system, and her fear of the Nightmare of Worms definitely outweighs a nebulous squick about putting an artifact on her _face_ , and maybe _part_ of her is thinking long-term, hoping the Mask of All Faces will finally solve her infiltrator role fit issue, so. She puts it on.

\--There is no Mask of All Faces.

(The woman who takes Sasha James's place is awkward, and distant, and terrified of being found out. She looks nothing like Sasha James. They never find the real Sasha's body, even after they've shut away the creature wearing her identity like a mask in the tunnels below the Institute.

Jon, obviously, never takes not!Sasha's statement. Whoever, whatever, Nightmare she is, she is manifestly, definitionally, not Sasha James.)


End file.
